In 1993 Volume reported that the song is simply the sound of a power station in San Francisco Bay, of which Mark Eitzel and Vudi overheard one day while out walking.[1]

Eitzel told Lime Lizard, “That’s a power station in San Francisco. I think it’s a systems check, to say that all the systems are going well. Me and Vudi were out there one night taking pictures and we listened to it and thought ‘This is it! We want this on the album’. We weren’t sure how we were going to use it, we just went and recorded it."[2]